Category: News

Grazed from Fox Business. Author: Donna Fuscaldo.

Cloud computing is all the rage with small and large businesses alike, but don’t jump blindly into this technology. Sure you can save money by adopting a cloud strategy, but there are risks to be considered.  “Before you sign on to the cloud you should stop and think for a moment about what you want to put in the cloud,” says Scott Hazdra, principal security consultant at Neohapsis, the cloud security provider. “You shouldn’t do it without thinking about it first.”

According to security experts, small businesses should have a cloud security policy in place before choosing a provider. With that in mind, here’s a look at three questions Hazdra says all small businesses need to ask before moving anything to the cloud — even if it’s just email…

Grazed from BizTechMagazine. Author: Ricky Ribiero.

What if the secret to faster, better networking speeds didn’t lie solely in hardware, additional switches and access points, but in letting the machines do the network management decision making? Network administrators might be breaking out into a sweat after reading that first line, but hear me out. According to a press release from the MIT News Office, a machine-driven system called Remy can generate TCP algorithms that could double network speeds.

In tests that simulated a high-speed, wired network with consistent transmission rates across physical links, Remy’s algorithms roughly doubled network throughput when compared to Compound TCP and TCP Cubic, while reducing delay by two-thirds…

Grazed from MarketWire. Author: PR Announcement.

GlobalWise and its wholly owned subsidiary Intellinetics, Inc., a leading-edge technology company focused on the design, implementation and management of cloud-based Enterprise Content Management ("ECM") systems in both the public and private sectors, is proud to announce the launch of their new Intelli-Cloud service offering.

Intelli-Cloud is powered by the company’s flagship product Intellivue? and delivers an improved strategy for offering document management solutions in a hosted environment, delivered over the Internet. Intelli-Cloud? is designed for improved operational impact and workflow processes for small to medium businesses. Intelli-Cloud offers end-users (clients) over 200 on-demand workflow solution templates to address both horizontal and vertical processes within a variety of industries. For an affordable monthly subscription fee, clients can use the Intelli-Cloud service offerings to minimize the high capital, upfront computer-related hardware expenditures as well as benefit from enhanced security and disaster recovery features…

Grazed from The Var Guy. Author: Christopher Tozzi.

In a move that promises to advance the development of open source Big Data and distributed storage technology, database-as-a-service (DaaS) provider Cloudant has announced the merging of its distributed database platform into the Apache Foundation’s CouchDB project. The decision is a good example of convergence within the open source world, and could have an especially important impact on open source clustering technology.

Cloudant has based its distributed database platform, called BigCouch, on Apache CouchDB since the company began developing the product in 2008. Inspired by their experience working on data storage at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, the Cloudant co-founders focused on engineering a service that delivers efficient fault tolerance and horizontal clustering…

Grazed from CloudTech. Author: James Bourne.

Over the next five years, cloud computing is still the highest priority for investment, according to the latest piece of research from Compuware, alongside Research in Action. 16.5% of companies cite cloud as the most important area of their IT portfolio to strengthen, ahead of mobile IT (13.5%), business analytics, big data and in-memory (11.3%).

It’s not a surprise that cloud is pretty big news this year too. Cloud infrastructure (12.5%) is the top area of investment for IT in 2013. Renegotiation of outsourcing contracts (9.6%) and investing in big data and analytics (9.2%) rounded off the top three…

Grazed from Midsize Insider. Author: Marissa Tejada.

More companies may be implementing cloud computing, but many don’t understand how their data is being secured as a result. That’s according to a new study that found security and privacy know-how needs to be improved among organizations seeking the benefits of the cloud.

Confidence in the Cloud

The study, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and Thales E-security, found that 53 percent of organizations are putting sensitive data in the cloud. The survey, featured in the Cloud Times, also found that 14 percent more companies were confident about the cloud compared to last year’s results. However, when it comes to understanding how their cloud provider is protecting that confidential data, just 30 percent of companies say they are informed enough about the topic…

Grazed from ZDNet. Author: Joe McKendrick.

What kinds of metrics should you demand from your cloud provider or data center? In their just-released book, Cloud Computing: Concepts, Technology & Architecture, authors Thomas Erl, Zaigham Mahmood and Ricardo Puttini spell out some of the key varaibles that make for a successful service level agreement for cloud services.

Quality of service is essential to meet cloud consumers’ business requirements, and the following are examples Erl and his co-authors provide as ways to measure and ultimately assure this quality:

• Availability Rate Metric: "Percentage of service uptime; measured as total uptime against total time"; expressed in percentages.
• Outage Duration Metric: "Duration of a single outage"; measured by date and time outage began and ended, expressed in hours and minutes.
• Mean-Time Between Failures (MTBF) Metric: "Expected time between consecutive service failures"; measured by normal operational period duration and number of failures; expressed as average number of days…

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Joe McKendrick.

Cost savings… elasticity…. scalability…. load “bursting”…. storage on demand… These are the advertised benefits of cloud computing, and they certainly help make for a solid business case for using either third-party services or a virtualized data center. But after the agreements are signed, systems and processes are set up, and users are retrained, something unexpected happens.

The initial use cases are realized, but then additional benefits begin to emerge — sort of like the icing on the cake, but often, these unforeseen benefits provide far more value to the business than initially planned. Over the past couple of years, I have spoken with many CIOs and executives who not only talk about the unplanned challenges, but also cite pleasant surprises as well. Here are some examples of such unexpected benefits that emerge as cloud projects roll along:..

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge.  Author: Rich Miller.

This week’s Industry Perspectives represented an intersection of top-of-mind topics for data center professionals and executives. If you missed any, here they are in a neat package. Enjoy!

Are You Up in the Air with Cloud Computing Benefits? – It’s going to take some time for the entire IT world to get on board with cloud computing, but the benefits are well worth it. A mix of private and public cloud services is a great compromise for companies who are worried about security issues, writes Alan McMahon of Dell…